This project will be a collaboration with community partners to co-design and evaluate new approaches to consultation. Consultation, the engagement of communities in public service decision making becoming an increasingly important part of local and regional life, with moves to help communities be more active and connected to their wider environment. This encouragement of ground up activity reflects a groundswell of new community, friends and special interests groups forming across the UK. It is also recognised by national government with legislation such as the Localism Bill (2011) laying out a sweeping agenda for empowering communities, e.g. giving residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue. Public bodies have always been involved in consultation with their communities and there is a strong desire for this to increase in the future and to support communities in playing a larger, more active role in society. This need (and desire) for more consultation coincides in dramatic reductions of Council funding. In the last 3 months one of the public sector partner departments we work with has been reduced from 22 to 4 people. Clearly new consultation practices are needed to accommodate both the opportunity presented by the demand for more consultation and a quite different funding landscape. Leapfrog will help create and evaluate these new models, working initially with test beds in Lancashire and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and then more broadly across the UK. Lancashire has closely packed overlapping communities that are hard to engage, e.g. with low rates of English literacy. The Highlands and Islands communities are very geographically dispersed and isolated and are strongly motivated to innovate by the hardships they face in terms of communications and access. Working across these two test-beds will stress test our new consultation approaches and help make them more robust when applied in other parts of the UK. We will develop these new approaches through a process of co-design. This involves collaboration with communities and public sector partners where all parties play an active role in the creative process (Cruickshank et al 2013). Communities will engage in a co-design process that results in a range of new consultation tools that specifically meet their local needs. For us a tool is something that, with skill, can be used to make wonderful, diverse, creative things (just like a real physical tool). In this proposal we are developing tools to help all people create their own amazing consultation processes. Our consultation tools will be used by communities directly, they will also be exchanged with other communities who will be encouraged to appropriate and adapt these tools to fit their own needs. Tools could be physical, digitally downloaded and printed or entirely digital in nature. We will use these tools to develop toolboxes containing a themed set of tools (e.g. consultation without writing, for groups with low levels of English literacy). We will produce at least 50 of each of the 5 toolboxes we produce. We will seed these toolboxes in at least 80 communities and public sector bodies across the UK. Underpinning all our actions, from co-design to innovation in local consultation to widely distributed toolboxes will be a series of new evaluation frameworks. These will be used to understand the real value and impact of the new tools. With strong guidance from Gareth Williams, our applied ethicist, these evaluation frameworks will be designed to be unobtrusive but also to examine activities in terms that make sense and are seen as valuable to communities. Rather than evaluation being something that is 'done to' communities this will also be a collaborative, mutually beneficial shared process. Cruickshank, Coupe and Hennessy, 'Co-Design: Fundamental Issues And Guidelines For Designers: Beyond the Castle Case Study', Swedish Design Research Journal no 2, 2013. page 4

The overall aim is to ensure that Scottish SMEs with international innovation and growth ambitions are empowered by unlocking their full growth potential through better internal innovation management capability. The underpinning objective of this proposal is therefore to deliver a quality service in Scotland that supports SMEs to increase their innovation management capacity and to innovate successfully and profitably. This requires not only a focused SME targeting strategy, but also qualified staff trained on appropriate tools and methodologies, delivering the right support to the right SMEs, coordinated with other delivery teams with the Enterprise Europe Network Scotland (EES) host organisations.

GreenOffshoreTech aims to support innovation in SMEs and fostering the development of the emerging Blue Economy industries by enabling the emergence of new cross-sectorial and cross-border value chains based on shared challenges and the deployment of key enabling technologies. This will result from the translation of advanced technologies among 8 sectors with strong synergies: offshore wind and other marine renewable energies, offshore and marine aquaculture, offshore oil & gas and waterborne transport, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and environmental technologies. GreenOffshoreTech will facilitate the creation of new products, processes or services with the ambition to make offshore production and transport greener, cleaner and modern towards a resource-efficient economy and EUs Green Deal. GreenOffshoreTech’s consortium will provide a structured framework to implement this innovation action and undertake two kind of activities to support innovation to SMEs directly: 1) Direct financial support to SMEs through a competitive Call of Proposal for innovation projects in relevant topics; and 2) A range of dedicated and tailored Business Support Services to the winner SMEs. In addition, GreenOffshoreTech's consortium will establish an open space, with a mixture of virtual and physical tools, to connect and facilitate collaboration of clusters and SMEs across sectors, regions and countries during and beyond the project. GreenOffshoreTech will support at least 82 SMEs and 82 SMEs innovation projects targeting to develop new innovative products, processes or services. GreenOffshoreTech is a cluster-facilitated project, bringing together 9 of Europe’s leading clusters and SME intermediaries from 15 regions and 7 countries: Norway, Portugal, Latvia, Poland, Iceland, UK (Scotland), Germany. In addition, 1 RTD and 2 SMEs as inter-cluster experts to support the project implementation. The GreenOffshoreTech is highly linked to Regional Smart Specialization Strategies and S3 partnerships.

The RIPEET project will support Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) policy experimentations for energy transition in three European territories - in Extremadura (ES), Highlands and Islands of Scotland (UK) and Ostrobothnia (FI). The methodology builds on RRI, transformative innovation, transition management and the Multi-Level-Perspective. RIPEET brings together quintuple helix actors of the territorial socio-technical energy regime in Transition Labs in order to envisage and implement a place-based energy transition process. Building on this evolutionary model of socio-technical transitions, RIPEET will use existing landscape and regime-level pressures to facilitate the development of territorial socio-technical futures based on RRI actions. The governance and agency in this transformative process will be organised within the Transition Labs. These Labs will bring together stakeholders to co-create common visions based on the potentials and priorities of territorial eco-systems (mapping and visioning), generate transition pathways and innovation needs, launching a call for immediate bottom-up solutions to these (pathways and piloting) and anchor the process on organisational as well as policy level (sustainability and exploitation). The framework conditions, processes, and outcomes of these experiments will be mapped, monitored, and evaluated. This constitutes an evidence-base for the revision of sectoral policies, strategies and research and innovation (R&I) instruments as well as for establishing a European RIPEET community. Thereby, RIPEET will support territories in establishing experimental spaces to address the territorial dimensions of the European Green Deal. The consortium consists of 11 renowned and EU-FP-experienced universities, research organisations, SMEs, CSOs, business and innovation centres and regional authorities from seven European countries, with the competences and territorial anchoring necessary to implement the approach.

The overall aim is to ensure that Scottish SMEs with international innovation and growth ambitions are empowered by unlocking their full growth potential through better internal innovation management capability. The underpinning objective of this proposal is therefore to pilot the development of a quality and workable Enterprise Europe Network delivery service in Scotland that supports SMEs to increase their innovation management capacity and to innovate successfully and profitably. This requires not only a focused SME targeting strategy, but also qualified staff trained on appropriate tools and methodologies, delivering the right support to the right SMEs, coordinated with other delivery teams with the Enterprise Europe Network Scotland (EES) host organisations. This proposed pilot project will cover the whole of Scotland, through the two innovation focussed partners of the EES consortium: Scottish Enterprise (SE) and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE). The majority of the activity will be carried out in the Scottish Enterprise region, which accounts for 91% of the population.